Paid parking should be everywhere, to be fair

Re: Paid parking is a matter of user pays, Letter to the editor, July 28.

“If we can afford to pay for a vehicle and all its additional expenses, we can afford to be responsible for paid parking” says letter writer Jim Gillis. “User pays, that’s fair.”

Let’s pursue this fairness idea further. It can’t be fair, for example, that a couple can park for free in a street to go and enjoy a nice meal in a restaurant or a pint in a pub while someone else has to pay to visit her sick mother in hospital.

Why pick on the sick? That’s clearly unfair.

So, to be fair and to ensure that all users pay their share, we must introduce parking meters on every street in town. Residents will be able to obtain permits to park in front of their houses or businesses but should expect to pay a hefty fee for this privilege. After all, it’s only fair that they should pay for their share of this scarce resource.

Then there’s all the cars parked for nothing outside shopping malls and stores while their owners are enjoying spending their money. That can’t be fair: that poor woman’s still having to pay to visit her sick mother.

So now we have to introduce pay-and-display systems in every car park in town.

Or maybe we can adopt a more technological method and install vehicle registration number reading equipment at the entrances and exits to each car park. The system will register how long each vehicle stays in every car park and automatically send each user a monthly bill for all their car parking, based on the exact time they spent parked.

You can’t get fairer than that. We could even install similar vehicle number recognition systems at every traffic light in town so that then road users can be charged for the time they spend on the roads and hence pay their fair share of the maintenance costs. I’m sure they’ll be delighted!